As Knoxville, Tennessee, continued grappling with the killing of rising high school football star Zaevion Dobson, President Barack Obama took to Twitter to repeat his call for stricter gun control laws. "Zaevion Dobson died saving three friends from getting shot," Obama wrote Sunday from Hawaii, where he arrived Friday for the holidays. "He was a hero at 15. What is our excuse for not acting?"

Workers represented by Los Angeles County's largest employee union voted to approve a tentative agreement with county management that would give them a 10% raise over three years. Service Employees International Union Local 721, which represents more than 57,000 county employees, including nurses, social workers and clerical workers, tallied ballots Thursday after a month long voting process. Apart from the pay increase, the new contract would make Cesar Chavez Day an official county holiday starting in 2017, provide as much as an additional week of annual vacation every year and put some temporary workers on a path to full-time jobs....

The plan for a museum in the city that would focus on climate and climate change, with exhibits that could relate to health, social justice and rain-delayed baseball games, moved a step forward Monday, officials said. The state Board of Regents, meeting in Albany, approved a five-year provisional charter for the museum, Regents spokesman Tom Dunn said. The vote means “there is absolutely going to be a museum,” said Miranda Massie, executive director of the Climate Museum Launch Project. She said the museum is now “empowered to hold collections in trust for the public.” Supporters say it would be the...

Reject them on this. Don't let the fomenters of hatred and the sowers of discord win. A terrible crime occurred in Charleston, South Carolina on Wednesday night. 21 year old Dylann Roof, a drug-using white supremacist and repeated criminal offender, walked into a black church in the city during an evening Bible study, pulled out a gun, and killed nine members of the church. In this hideous act of terrorism, not just a community, but an entire nation was shaken to its core. Because of the actions of this disgusting little cretin, race relations in America have been severely damaged,...

Poachers kill 300 Zimbabwe elephants with cyanide • Cyanide has been used to kill 300 elephants in Zimbabwe's biggest nature reserve - three times the original estimate - as new photos show the scale of the slaughter Poachers in Zimbabwe have killed more than 300 elephants and countless other safari animals by cyanide poisoning, The Telegraph has learned. The full extent of the devastation wreaked in Hwange, the country's largest national park, has been revealed by legitimate hunters who discovered what conservationists say is the worst single massacre in southern Africa for 25 years. Pictures taken by the hunters, which...

A “secret” Facebook group of foreign correspondents and human rights activists quickly devolved into an anti-Israel hate-fest on Tuesday following the release of a new Israeli government report that cleared the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) of wrongdoing in the 2000 death of a Palestinian boy. The Israeli government report contests the claim that the IDF killed a Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Durrah, in a famous 2000 incident in Gaza that helped ignite the Second Intifada. Journalists and activists mocked the report, attacked the IDF, and claimed pro-Israel lobbyists were influencing the media coverage, in a private Facebook group for foreign correspondents...

Somewhere toward the end of "A Few Good Men" comes the only scene from the movie that anyone actually remembers. It's the one where Jack Nicholson in a uniform begins chewing the scenery and turns a dreary Aaron Sorkin adaptation of an Aaron Sorkin play into a memorable movie while inflicting Sorkin on the entertainment industry for the next two decades. The familiar thesis of Nicholson's Colonel Jessup is that he does what needs to be done and what no one wants to talk about needing to be done. His existence may be "grotesque and incomprehensible to you", but he...

If vultures are a bad omen, one New Jersey town should brace for disaster. More than 100 of the sinister black birds descended on Bridgewater this week, spooking residents. But authorities are more concerned about the damage the vultures will do to the properties they're congregating near. ............... Resident Tim Friar said he'd seen the birds gather in the same area before but never this many. 'I noticed them about two years ago and thought, now that's a big bird,' he told nj.com. 'Then I started to see an ungodly amount. It's just eerie.' 'Vultures like pine trees and evergreen...

Thanks to a mild winter, swarms of turkey vultures have made themselves at home in Shelby, N.C., but town residents are wary of their neighbors. While the birds normally pass through the city while migrating south for the winter, the vultures have been sticking around this year, swarming lawns and making residents nervous. "We are just not getting cold enough to push them along," Kristen Duren, an intern with the North Carolina Cooperative Extension, the state agriculture service, told ABC's Charlotte, N.C. affiliate WSOC-TV. "What used to be five to 10 birds is going up to 150 birds."

Since the tragedy at Sandy Hook, America has debated desperately for an appropriate response to match the weight of its outrage... In the midst of media frenzy, Finkelhor’s statistics are comforting. Sandy Hook is an anomaly; school shootings are extremely rare to begin with and have actually fallen since the 1990s. According to Finkelhor, Sandy Hook is unusual in many ways, but he stressed that the knowledge we may get from analyzing this case will not necessarily be useful in terms of the things the nation needs most in order to keep children safe. “I’m not saying that there are...

*Marvin Gaye‘s son and Lenny Kravitz may be childhood friends, but it doesn’t mean the heir wants the rocker playing his father on the big screen. In fact, Marvin Gaye III and his family members are against the project altogether, according to TMZ.com. Kravitz will play Gaye in the biopic “Sexual Healing” (working title), which is said to follow the legend’s life in the 80s when he battled drug abuse and depression – up until his father shot and killed him in 1984. Gaye III tells TMZ “The producers and directors of this film are very wrong and shameful …...

Feasting on Israel By Ari Bussel When will we be able to dance on the ruins of the Jewish State? It has been too long in the planning, time to reap the benefits of our hard work! With Tunisia, Egypt and Libya now part of the Iranian Axis, shall anyone wager a bet, who will be next to fall into extremist Islamic hands: Israel or Syria? Or perhaps a tie, with both falling simultaneously? “Democracy,” chanted the multitudes in a frenzied cry. “Freedom” whispered so many with hope glistening in their eyes. “Change” pronounced the American President as he pushed...

MIAMI, - Officials and workers at Florida's Everglades National Park said vultures have been ripping rubber parts from vehicles parked in the area. Linda Hyde, who works at the Anhinga Trail gift shop in the park, said the vultures have been picking windshield wipers, door seals, sunroof seals and other parts made from rubber and vinyl from vehicles at the park, The Miami Herald reported Tuesday. She said the park's attempts at keeping the vultures away from the cars, including effigies and hanging the carcasses of dead vultures, have not dissuaded the birds from pecking on cars. Dave Hallac, chief...

At Everglades National Park, managers struggle to control vultures' appetites for the rubber and plastic on visitors' vehicles.Behind her counter in the gift shop at Anhinga Trail, the first and most popular tourist stop in Everglades National Park, Linda Hyde keeps a secret weapon against forbidding creatures that spent much of the winter lurking in the parking lot and preying on random visitors and staffers. Not pythons, gators, panthers or even infamously blood-thirsty mosquitoes. Vultures. Some of the big black birds, known primarily for dining on the dead and decaying, also have developed an appetite for something unusual: car parts....

HARTFORD — State labor leaders and union-endorsed legislators came out with “guns blazing” Thursday. Though the announced purpose of the press conference in the Legislative Office Building was an unveiling of Connecticut AFL-CIO’s 2010 legislative agenda, the target was often the Connecticut Business & Industry Association. State AFL-CIO President John Olsen, Secretary-Treasurer Lori Pelletier, and state Sen. Edith Prague, D-Norwich, (and 10 other towns) took aim at the 10,000-member business organization. Olsen said CBIA ads about jobs and cutting taxes were “simplistic. A small-minded approach like theirs is a major mistake. Instead, we should be looking at how we can...

RIDGEWAY, Va. - The birds are watching Nancy Cox, waiting on her lawn and slowly chewing their way inside her Ridgeway home. After a flock of almost 200 black vultures moved to Ridgeway this fall, Cox has had a steady stream of 30-35 large, hostile, hungry visitors each day. "I can't even sit down to eat at the table," she said. "The vultures watch me through the window and fly into the doors trying to get into the house." Cox has the only home in her neighborhood with rubber roofing. But she may not have it much longer. The vultures...

WASHINGTON, April 1, 2009 – Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has approved a policy change that, under strictly delineated conditions, allows media filming of dignified transfer operations of fallen servicemembers’ remains at Dover Air Force Base, Del. The new policy is slated to be implemented April 6, Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told reporters today. If immediate family members consent to media coverage, Whitman said, reporters would be provided the basic information on the servicemember and the expected time of arrival of the flight bearing the remains. “The core of the policy,” Whitman said, “is built around the desires of...

Spanish vultures are hungry, even starving — and the regional government in Madrid plans to do something about it. EU laws aimed at halting the spread of mad cow disease require the countryside to be kept clear of dead livestock even if they died of natural causes. But Juan Carlos Atienza of the Spanish Ornithological Organization says the lack of animal corpses since the law was introduced in Spain in 2002 has hit certain vultures very hard. Esperanza Aguirre, president of Madrid's regional government, said Monday the capital aims to ease the vultures' hunger by allowing some dead animals to...

Coverage of Steve Jobs' health issues has not been journalism's finest hour What is it about Steve Jobs that makes otherwise sensible journalists completely lose their marbles? This week’s coverage of Steve Jobs’ health woes has hit some surprising new lows in journalistic IQ. The latest example is a story on Newser.com by media reporter Michael Wolff, headlined Apple Dies. Its premise: “the logical answer to what happens at Apple without Jobs is that it dies. What you have, demonstrably, is a company without any managerial wherewithal beyond Jobs.” What is demonstrable is that Michael Wolff doesn’t know what he’s...